First crack at a timelapse

[The_bluester]

I thought I would stick this in this section as I really regard myself as a complete beginner to AP.

I decided on the weekend to have a go at making a timelapse (Even with the moon up) so naturally the weather made things difficult.

Taken with a modified 350D using Backyard EOS with 15 second frames shot every 30 seconds, no darks and about 1200 frames all up for 12 hours. Turned into a timelapse using software called "Time-Lapse Tool" resolution limited by being the free version. Not sure if I will pay for it yet as it is relatively expensive for the top version which would output the file in up to 4K resolution.

The modded cam gives it a red cast which is a a bit of a pain to process out for the lapse, but anyway, it was time to have a go.

https://youtu.be/aT3yB1T1dzs

[rustigsmed]

nice effort Paul!
i can't remember what i used to do to put my timelapses together, something free on windows, there must be others out there.

cheers

[The_bluester]

I was hoping to use windows Movie Maker but Microsoft have killed it off. You cant even download it any more. I did quite a bit of googling to land on the one I used. Most of the howtos I found were basically advertorials for one companies software or another.

I learned a bit doing this one, mostly that it will be easier to produce JPG images off the camera as most of the software will require it anyway to create a lapse (Meaning I had to find a Canon RAW to JPG converter) and the file naming setup needs to be carefully considered in Backyard EOS to produce a file structure that will make it easy to import 1200 files in the right order!

Hopefully some clear weather pops up in the next couple of weeks so I can have another go. But sooner or later I will need to use a better camera. I bought the 350D on here as a cheap intro and it has some limitations, as well as a not very sensitive and quite noisy sensor. With a bit more gear I can use my wife's Nikon D3 with is more sensitive, less noisy and not modded so the colour is easier to deal with.

[The_bluester]

I am in two minds about posting this bit as a thread in the software section as part of it is about software, but a lot of it is as my own criticism of what I have done here so I will just post it here at least for now.

First my own critique of what I have done on the weekend, any more experienced folk please feel free to chime in with constructive criticism too.

Focus is maybe not quite right but it is a bit of a limitation of the camera I used (Canon 350D) which has no live view function, so getting it just right is tricky. It also can not be focused via the software so it means playing with the cam while the timelapse is underway, you can see things move about in a couple of frames when I decided to tweak it, without live view it is time consuming waiting 30 seconds between tweaks to see if you are going the right way. The alternative being to suspend the captures to do it and get a jump in the finished product.

Colour correction is very much so-so here, the astro modified cam (IR filter removed) gives a pronounced cast to the images and the impact varies depending on the content of the individual image, the lapse software I used provided a basic colour correction tool but that is overall on all frames, not frame by frame.

Dark frames have not been applied at all, which are needed as at 15 seconds the camera displays the expected amount of hot pixels. No flats have been applied either.

The output resolution is quite low so it is all a bit on the fuzzy side, but that is a limitation of the free version of the software I used to create the time lapse.

Does anyone have a handle on good free or relatively low cost software to produce a timelapse from a large number of still images? Outputting the file in the native resolution of the input images?

Second question, does anyone know of image manipulation software (Free or not) which allows for batch processing of a large number of images (Around 1200 for the night in this case) to bulk apply darks, flats and bias frames etc? I found a batch processing script for GIMP (Which I am using at the moment) but it does not appear to work correctly, it is supposed to subtract a selected image from another selection of images but it seems to go overboard, with the dark I shot at the appropriate exposure time producing visible dark spots where the hot pixels were. Manually opening the dark and light frame as layers, subtracting the dark from the light and flattening the resulting image did not do give them spots.

[rustigsmed]

can't you use the live view function in backyard eos for focus?

[The_bluester]

Not with a camera that old, the 350D does not provide any live view functionality for BYE to work with. The best you can do is repeated exposures as short as you can get away with, so focus then becomes a case of repeated tweaks with about 15 seconds between images. It is half the time between images compared to the imaging I was doing but you are still talking minutes of fiddling to be even sure you are going the right way versus seconds with live view.

To solve that one I really need another camera of later model that supports live view. Maybe a Christmas present to myself as something later would be better resolution and more sensitive.

[Mickoid]

Paul, for a first go at time-lapse photography, I'd be more than happy with that. It turned out really well, I think you're being over critical. The main complaint here would be the weather, as it probably wasn't the ideal conditions to give you the result you were hoping for. Then again, by doing this you haven't wasted a good night experimenting as a novice. With experience under your belt now you can look back at what you did right and what you did wrong and make adjustments to get a better result under better conditions. Well done.

As for shooting in RAW, why not just shoot in JPEG, no need to convert your files and if you set a JPEG resolution to match the video resolution of a single frame, the files will be much smaller, take up less disk space so you can shoot more with shorter intervals. Let's face it, full HD video is still only 1920 X 1080 pixels so depending on your sensor resolution, you may only need a medium quality JPEG to match or exceed that resolution.

The focus looks pretty good when viewing the footage on my phone but I guess when you display it on a large monitor you can see that it's not. Not having live view is a bummer but most timelapses are shot at infinity so why not just keep playing with the focus during the day, take a shot, have a look and keep adjusting and checking your shots until you get it right. Then you can refer that point on your lens with two small pieces of masking tape marked with a fine line that you align and know will be in focus at infinity. Also, a UV/IR cut filter will eliminate the cast caused by the modded camera. You can pick them up real cheap on eBay to fit your lens size and they work fine. Mind you, you'd have to do your daylight infinity focussing test with the filter in place as it will be different than without one.

Good luck and I look forward to your next and hopefully improved version :thumbsup:.

[The_bluester]

Thanks, a couple of ideas to try there. I am actually playing with Pixinsight right now, seeing how I go getting it to bulk apply a dark frame.

Shooting in RAW format I guess comes from my (Photographer) wife, who would kick me pretty hard if I happened to come up with a creal cracker of an image and only saved it in a lossy format.

A good idea about playing with the focus in daylight, infinity is not at the stop on the focus ring so if I can find and mark it in daylight then that would make for quicker setup.

I never thought about ebaying a screw on filter, I will look into that. For timelapses the more faithful colour would outweigh any advantage of not having the filter to start with.

[sacredblack]

Paul,

The best freebie to use for creating movies on a PC is Virtualdub. I've used it for years and still use it now. As long as you have a string of sequentially numbered frames, it will put out a movie for you. It has resizing functions and filtering of various types. Of course you need to use JPEG or PNG etc. The only annoying bit is installing different codecs for it to get different output formats.

Steve

[The_bluester]

I will have a look at that. I used Virtualdub for something else ages ago and did not think of it for timelapses.

If I get a UV/IR cut filter then half of the work I am doing now is done for me with correct colours. Backyard EOS will spit out sequential file numbers for me if I want it to (I dug into that after realising the default file naming scheme would not work well for the purpose)

Now I just need a half decent night to go again. Friday night is looking possible though the moon will be in view half the night so I won't get much by way of visible stars. I might have a go anyway for the practice.

[Retrograde]

That looks really good for a first attempt Paul.

As far as using JPEG rather than RAW I've found that for dark sky and Milky Way time lapses that if you use JPEG the results look flat and can't be properly stretched to bring out extra detail. It's obviously a pain having to resize and convert to JPEG prior to animating but the extra work is generally worth it I've found.

I also use VirtualDub to create the sequence and find it works quite well. I usually then use Windows Movie Maker to edit and convert the avi video file to something like MP4 format which is smaller and easier to upload etc.
Not sure what you could use as a replacement for this however if it's no longer available.

[The_bluester]

Still practicing, with the moon in the way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HwKw5Lv1Us

[batema]

Hi Paul,

They both look great. I shoot my time lapses using a 6D with 14mm lens for 20 second shot with a 2 maybe 3 second interval and it smooths the time lapse nicely. I think the moon looks great.

Mark

[The_bluester]

I was keeping about 10 seconds between shots to try to keep sensor temperature under control. Not that it matters much, it is a pretty noisy thing, as soon as you get over abot a second you start to see hot pixels.

The next trick would be a batch processing setup to apply a dark frame to 1200 images! Anyone know of one?

[The_bluester]

The other issue i am grappling with is that BYE is taking around 1200 shots then stopping with a "Session complete" message. It should be looping indefinitely, even the software author says it should just keep going.

I tried a daytime lapse today with short shutter times and short pauses and it still took around 1200 images and stopped. No errors, it just stops with a "Complete" dialog.

[JA]

Hi Paul,

I like the time-lapse, but I agree with Mark that it would be better smoothed out with an increased interval between images (look better slower), especially with the relatively fast moving clouds. I think it's important to keep speed slow to moderate to avoid any rushed or in the extreme, "keystone-cops" type effect, whilst at the same time not have the interval so large as to make any stuttering/juddering between images apparent. An increased interval between images would also mean fewer images for a longer time-lapse and help you avoid your possible 1200 image "limit"/problem.

Best
JA

[The_bluester]

Yeah, I am currently a little bit between a rock and a hard place. I would prefer to keep to one of the "standard" frame rates or a multiple or even divisor of, in case I ever put it on a screen that lacks flexibility regards frame rates.

That currently leaves me with the options of reducing the rate (It is 25FPS now, I could cut it to 15) but I thought it looked too obviously like a group of stills stitched together, or I can shoot more frames so the same frame rate should be smoother without looking like Benny Hill, but for night lapses I am limited by exposure times and in the day, by the seeming limitation to about 1200 frames.

I am trying to reproduce that a couple of times to get some log files for the software author, knowing my luck it is some silly limitation of Windows XP, and getting rid of XP would require a camera update, not really what I want to do at this end of the learning curve.

That said, on that lapse with the moon rising through it I can probably cut the rate down, though the clouds are still going to fly along, it was actually pretty windy.

[The_bluester]

At this point it looks like a software issue (Something that the author can probably change if he wants to) that was limiting the number of frames. I ran a test today in the house, it stopped after 1000 frames both times with "Loop" selected, which in theory should mean it just keeps on snapping.

Another thing I can probably do is use more lines in the BYE capture plan, to date I have just been setting 1 frame of the appropriate duration and ISO with a delay to suit what I want to do after each frame and select loop. Give it a 10 second delay and loop and it should take a frame to whatever is set in the plan, wait ten seconds and then continue indefinitely. 1000 and stop sounds like I am just doing something that they did not envisage.

Anyway, regardless of it it is a software niggle that they elect to find and fix, I should be able to work around it now that I know it is there. I would love to capture a lot more frames to make the lapse smooth.

After that it is time to learn some more processing tricks.

[The_bluester]

Well the 1000 images issue is resolved. IN the background in the BYE software, the loop button is limited to 1000 iterations of the capture plan. Now that I know that I can simply put in a single line plan (Which makes it easy to change exposure time or ISO quickly if required) of 20 frames with loop selected and that would run long enough to give a more than 24 hour real time lapse with a frame every five seconds. Given at night I would be wanting 15 second or longer exposures that gives plenty of fat.

I did not initially spot that it was 1000 frames then stop as I have often been messing about with settings, so you abort the run, change a setting and restart it, That starts the clock again at 0 frames so sometimes I was getting 1200 or 1300 frames before it stopped.

[Terere]

Not a terribly user friendly option, but I've made timelapses using ffmpeg and a free batch file renaming tool. You have to be comfy using the command line, but it works and it's free. Once you have the basic command you need (read: long command with many options) it's pretty easy to change stuff like resolution and codec.

This is just literally stitching a bunch of frames together, though. I think more advanced tools smooth out jitter and whatnot. I have never looked into batch aligning things to smooth out jitter. I also just use jpgs from the camera when doing this, you can fit way more frames on the card.

I have a friend who does awesome stuff just using a phone and some apps on it (landscapes, though, not stars).

EDIT: here's my basic process:
Get ffmpeg and make sure it's in your path (or call it from wherever you saved it)
Put all the jpeg files in a sub folder of where you're working (e.g. "e:\video\in")
Use a batch file name utility to rename them sequentially with numbers starting at 0001 (pad it with zeros up to the number of digits you need to get to). You don't need to start with the number, e.g. "DSCF0001.JPG" will work. I found I needed the number to start at 1, though.
From the command line, go to the "video" folder and run something like this:
explanation:
ffmpeg -- the name of the program you're running
-f image2 -- I forget what this option is for, but I'm sure you can Google it
-r 12 -- a framerate of 12 frames per second. You can play around with this, but lower numbers start doing things that don't make sense
-i in/DSCF%04d.jpg -- the pattern for your input files. All the files I used started with DSCF, then have 4 digits ("%04d"), then finish with .jpg
-pix_fmt yuv420p -- I forget. Something to do with the colour space. This is where you might bump into problems depending on your camera. I'm using a Fuji X-M1. Then again, it might only be to do with the output video.
-vcodec h264 -- the video codec
-vf scale=1920:1008 -- the resolution I'm scaling to (from full res pictures)
-y fire_Jun2015_1080p.mp4 -- not sure if "-y" is a standalone option, but the last bit was the output filename.

Example results:
https://www.instagram.com/p/3tSAcGHsTX/

EDIT 2
Ahaha, I've had a typo in my script all this time. The resolution should probably be 1920:1080

[The_bluester]

Virtualdub seems to do much the same thing but from a GUI. The Timlapse Tool software I tried first seems to be better in some ways but not in others, I am not all that keen to pay $130 to confirm my suspicions about it's limitations though.

I am still hunting around for options to batch apply dark frames, I have not worked out how to do it in Pixinsight, there is a script to do it in GIMP, but it does not seem to respect any processing order by way of file names (While spitting out files it has applied the dark to with new, sequential file names) so the dark applied frames end up out of order and useless to create a lapse with. I have to look more closely at that one and make sure I am not missing a setting that will resolve it.

Anyway, nothing to do for a bit now, I am away this weekend so I won't have any new files to play with for another week and a bit.

[Mickoid]

Why not just use the built in noise reduction function that most digital cameras have as an option to turn on or off. The noise reduction function is basically a dark frame applied automatically to each frame, you just have to make sure your interval time allows the camera to process the dark frame which is essentially your frame exposure time. So if your frame exposure is 20 seconds, then your interval time with noise reduction on will have to be at least 40 seconds.

[The_bluester]

In this case I have two issues. First up the camera I am currently using is too old to take and automatically apply a dark frame (Unless I have missed it in the menus) but as much as anything else, I am wanting as many frames as I can get to make the lapse smooth where using internally generated dark frames will more or less halve my frame rate (I have been inserting a pause between frames to help control sensor temperature)

It may yet be feasible though with shorter exposures, I just worked out that the camera keeps defaulting to F7.1 on startup and sometimes even changes if the lens is zoomed in and back out again, so I should be able to capture more detail at the same or shorter exposure time now that I have worked out that niggle. I just have to remember to check every time I touch the thing that it has remained at F3.5, it is not obvious unless you check out the image exif data afterwards as you have to check it specifically, the default display if you look through the finder is exposure time.

[Mickoid]

Googled info on noise reduction for your camera and found a photo forum with this about the topic: "go to menu 2nd utility menu (orange color tab with wrench and hammer in it) custom functions number 2 allows you to turn on or off noise reduction I also hear that it doesnt really make any noticable difference, but I DO know that when you use it, and say for example you take a 30sec exposure, it will take a additinal 30 seconds for the camera to process it. hope this helps!"

[The_bluester]

I will have to look at it, and make sure it has the latest (Final) firmware on it. A lot of the time Canon seem to give their own names to common functions so I must have missed it.

I have to have another go anyway given that I just worked out that the camera was by default stopping itself down to F7.1 instead of F3.5. I can stay with a 20 second exposure with NR turned on assuming the firmware on it supports it, if not, I will update to the final one) and get a lot more data with a frame rate still around once every 45 seconds. I might even be able to cut it to 15 seconds exposure with 15 seconds dark frame time, a few seconds processing internally and download and get 40 seconds per exposure overall or a bit less.

Next weekend, unless I get home and the forecast for the night looks worth having a go at.

[The_bluester]

Well the long exposure noise reduction does work fairly effectively, you need to drill well down into the menus to find it though. People saying it does not make a noticeable difference I would have to suspect are not aware of what they are looking for.

I will have to have another go at the next opportunity now I have worked out that it is available and fairly effective (there still seems to be some random hot pixels on some frames, where normal light frames were quite noisy before) and that it had changed back to F7.1.

F3.5 at 15 seconds in a 40 second cycle (I timed a couple of cycles with NR on) should get me a lot more detail in the sky than I was getting out of 30 seconds at F7.1

[Mickoid]

Yes, as long as you shoot at around ISO 3200 then 15secs@f3.5 should give you good detail on a moonless night. So as an example, if you shoot for 12 hours, say 7.00pm until 7.00am, with a 40 second interval, you will capture 1080 frames: 12hrs X 60 X 60 = 43200 seconds. 43200/40 = 1080. Now @ 24fps your time-lapse will run for 45 seconds. If you choose 15fps , the time-lapse duration will be 72 seconds, not as smooth but still very watchable. It really depends on whether you want quantity or quality.

Personally, I'd use 24fps because 45 seconds is quite long enough to maintain the viewers interest and the result will look smoother. Do you shoot in AV priority so the camera can compensate for the fluctuating light conditions? That way, your sunset and sunrise transitions will be exposed correctly.

[The_bluester]

The camera maxes at iso1600 so that is what I use. I am aiming for the best quality I can manage so I will have to play with the frame rate to see what looks best. I can't use AV as it seems to top out at about half a second exposure. I have to look into that more as it would be nice to get good transitions, even a full 24 hour lapse.

The camera is a bit of a pain, I am not at work tomorrow so I have it doing another test run tonight to see how the in camera noise reduction goes. IN the time powered down between the house and shed it defaulted back to off.

[The_bluester]

OK, last go before I get a combination of no moon to speak of, the IR/UV cut filter to make processing colour easier and a better weather forecast (I know, I want everything!)

Anyway, long exposure noise reduction turned on in camera (Which seems to have to be done every time the battery pack is removed) and mostly 20 second exposures on as high a rotation as I could get without upsetting the software. Brought down to 800 X 533 in size and a bit of a colour tweak in Virtualdub to reduce the cast form the lack of an IR filter. Output at 15 frames per second.

https://youtu.be/S6TW_xd_6So

[The_bluester]

The sky was clear so I decided to have another play tonight. As I suspected, AV mode is not usable for the purpose. I thought from testing in the house it would top out at about 1/3 of a second exposure which was not right, it went longer than that but pegged at 2.5 seconds.

I will have to have a try with my wife's D3 and see how it behaves, though I am not allowed to leave that out all night before I find a weatherproof enclosure for it. At least I could let it run in the dusk and see if it keeps on going to a decent exposure time.